Link Roundup! Best Retirement Ever; Think Like A Marketer; Manterruption, & More

+ “I’m so spoiled I doubt that I would ever be able to readjust to the real world,” says retiree who has made her home on a cruise ship for nearly a decade. “Here I am today living a stress-free, fairy-tale life.” Of course, room, board, and entertainment cost her $164,000 a year, but she gets to travel the world and dance every night. Maybe she’ll even meet a Jack Dawson! (I’ve never been on a cruise, but I assume a Jack Dawson comes standard.)

+ To get a job, think (and act) like a marketer?

Appeal to your target market. Before potential employers see your name on a list of applicants, you should be working to interact and market yourself directly. Turn one-way communication into an ongoing conversation by engaging with companies on social media. Don’t forget to spruce up your online personality, and keep your digital resume updated. …

Communicate through multiple platforms. Pay attention to the companies you’re interested in working for on social platforms. Read their blogs, follow them on Twitter and connect with key employees on LinkedIn. Once you’ve spent about a week closely following them, make an articulate comment on a blog post or ask an insightful question. This demonstrates interest and shows them how you’ll communicate with their team and clients. It’s like an audition they didn’t know they’d called.

If you want to take it a step further, attend professional association meetings and engage with potential employers in person. Very few students take advantage of these opportunities, but nothing is more powerful than making your debut face-to-face.

Tracy Flick could do that! A regular human being would probably be exhausted by Day Two and selling their organs on Craigslist instead by Day Four.

+ The many, many reasons it is expensive to be poor:

in 2015 the poorest fifth of Americans will pay on average 10.9 percent of their income in state and local taxes, the middle fifth will pay 9.4 percent and the top 1 percent will average 5.4 percent.”

In addition, many low-income people are “unbanked” (not served by a financial institution), and thus nearly eaten alive by exorbitant fees. As the St. Louis Federal Reserve pointed out in 2010:

“Unbanked consumers spend approximately 2.5 to 3 percent of a government benefits check and between 4 percent and 5 percent of payroll check just to cash them. Additional dollars are spent to purchase money orders to pay routine monthly expenses. When you consider the cost for cashing a bi-weekly payroll check and buying about six money orders each month, a household with a net income of $20,000 may pay as much as $1,200 annually for alternative service fees — substantially more than the expense of a monthly checking account.”

+ On Manterruption and how to avoid it at work:

ask any woman in the working world and we all recognize the phenomenon. We speak up in a meeting, only to hear a man’s voice chime in louder. We pitch an idea, perhaps too uncertainly — only to have a dude repeat it with authority. We may possess the skill, but he has the right vocal cords — which means we shut up, losing our confidence (or worse, the credit for the work).

We might have thought we were just being paranoid. But thanks to Sheryl Sandberg and Wharton business school professor Adam Grant (a man!) we can feel just a little less crazy when we mentally replay those meetings gone wrong. In a new op-ed in the New York Times, they point out the perils of “speaking while female,” along with a bevy of new research to prove that no, this is not all in our heads. … The data follows a long line of research showing that when it comes to the workplace, women speak less, are interrupted more, and have their ideas more harshly scrutinized.

The one-word answer — as always, when it isn’t “moderation” — is “confidence.” Strike a pose, ladies! A power pose.

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